[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] My Coming Out Essay
Oct. 17th, 2004 04:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldMonday, I'd written that I was planning on writing an essay associated with National Coming out Day, inspired by Jason Kuznicki's two essays. I'd found it difficult to find a way to start the essay, though, to identify some point in time, or some observation, that could help sum up my reaction to the past two years and eight months.
It's only today that I realized that I must have been trying too hard. Earlier that Monday, while I was walking on Toronto Island, I received a long-distance phone call from Douglas Muir of Halfway Down the Danube. I'd seen Doug only once, in New York City two years ago, but I'd known him through discussions on soc.history.what-if before that time, and I've known him since. He was calling from Romania, and the telephonic connections weren't weren't very good, the connection having failed already once before in the conversation,. Just before the call cut out for a second time, he asked me how I was feeling, how I was doing.
I said, "I feel normal."
I can't lay claim to any particularly compelling narratives from my teenage years, say, as I recognized my difference, or my difficult efforts to try to hide it from others and always feeling revelation, for the simple reason that I don't have any narratives like that.
As a teenager, I think that I managed things too well, that I strived prematurely for an appearance of competency. Schoolwork--first in the public school system, then at UPEI--was my main concern; the Internet, from September 1997 on, came second. I rather enjoyed academia, and I still do; my relationship with the Internet has much the same tenor. From what I remember of my face-to-face relationships with other people, though, these relationships were polite, amicable, sometimes outright friendly, but there was always a sense of distance that I tried, almost consciously, to cultivate. It might be of some importance to take note, here, that for my first three years at UPEI, my only social interactions with fellow students outside of the classroom took place in the context of the Debating Society, perhaps the one niche of student society where communications were expected to be polite and amicable but with a certain bantering distance. (An attempt at writing for the UPEI student newspaper lasted barely more than a semester; too many people, perhaps.)
I've long since lost my first-year undergraduate's confidence in Descartes and his description of the human mind as knowable to itself. Until the age of 22, and to a degree even now, I operated against the background of a whole variety of unconscious and subconscious motivations which kept me from doing anything which might have caused me trouble. Social relationships were by far the most potentially problematic things, of course, and I took care to remain separate from all sorts of social relationships--peers at UPEI, at work, people I saw around--because, I suppose, I wanted to avoid getting hurt one way or another.
This wasn't viable, of course. Human individuals are defined by their social relationships, by the way that they fit into human communities. An individual separated from a community is a lonely individual; an individual who thinks himself self-sufficient, known completely to himself and not needing to communicate this knowledge with any others, is an impoverished individual.
I can't imagine that ignorance lasting; I don't want to imagine what would have happened had it persisted. I'm lucky, then, that I had that particularly sharp mental revelation that I did, in fact, have a sexual orientation, and my continued thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vcutag for that.
And now? I can't say that I've suffered in any way. Looking back at events since 4 February 2002, I've in fact prospered, making friends in all kinds of social circles, finding jobs, dating and having sex, finding temporary and permanent lodgings, starting blogging. Judged purely on its material and social results, coming out has been a rather nice positive for me.
What I think that I appreciate most is the sense of normality. I still have various issues, things I want to improve, things I want to accomplish, things which need to be overcome. But more and more frequently, first starting as I went about my life in Kingston last year and then as I go about Toronto now, I feel overcome. I am walking down Yonge Street from Wellesley station, or I am glancing at the coloured tiles on the wall of the staircase leading into Osgoode station, or I am in some other moment (private or not), and I realize how completely unbelievable this life would have been to me a mere three years ago, how unattainable it would have seemed to me then, and how unimaginable that I would have been able to ever accomplish this, and how ridiculously and sadly hopeful it would have been that I could hope to accomplish still more.
I feel, as I observed to Doug, normal. I've got issues, I've got challenges, but they're normal issues and normal challenges. For that, I feel so wonderfully grateful to everything.
It's only today that I realized that I must have been trying too hard. Earlier that Monday, while I was walking on Toronto Island, I received a long-distance phone call from Douglas Muir of Halfway Down the Danube. I'd seen Doug only once, in New York City two years ago, but I'd known him through discussions on soc.history.what-if before that time, and I've known him since. He was calling from Romania, and the telephonic connections weren't weren't very good, the connection having failed already once before in the conversation,. Just before the call cut out for a second time, he asked me how I was feeling, how I was doing.
I said, "I feel normal."
I can't lay claim to any particularly compelling narratives from my teenage years, say, as I recognized my difference, or my difficult efforts to try to hide it from others and always feeling revelation, for the simple reason that I don't have any narratives like that.
As a teenager, I think that I managed things too well, that I strived prematurely for an appearance of competency. Schoolwork--first in the public school system, then at UPEI--was my main concern; the Internet, from September 1997 on, came second. I rather enjoyed academia, and I still do; my relationship with the Internet has much the same tenor. From what I remember of my face-to-face relationships with other people, though, these relationships were polite, amicable, sometimes outright friendly, but there was always a sense of distance that I tried, almost consciously, to cultivate. It might be of some importance to take note, here, that for my first three years at UPEI, my only social interactions with fellow students outside of the classroom took place in the context of the Debating Society, perhaps the one niche of student society where communications were expected to be polite and amicable but with a certain bantering distance. (An attempt at writing for the UPEI student newspaper lasted barely more than a semester; too many people, perhaps.)
I've long since lost my first-year undergraduate's confidence in Descartes and his description of the human mind as knowable to itself. Until the age of 22, and to a degree even now, I operated against the background of a whole variety of unconscious and subconscious motivations which kept me from doing anything which might have caused me trouble. Social relationships were by far the most potentially problematic things, of course, and I took care to remain separate from all sorts of social relationships--peers at UPEI, at work, people I saw around--because, I suppose, I wanted to avoid getting hurt one way or another.
This wasn't viable, of course. Human individuals are defined by their social relationships, by the way that they fit into human communities. An individual separated from a community is a lonely individual; an individual who thinks himself self-sufficient, known completely to himself and not needing to communicate this knowledge with any others, is an impoverished individual.
I can't imagine that ignorance lasting; I don't want to imagine what would have happened had it persisted. I'm lucky, then, that I had that particularly sharp mental revelation that I did, in fact, have a sexual orientation, and my continued thanks to
vcutag for that.And now? I can't say that I've suffered in any way. Looking back at events since 4 February 2002, I've in fact prospered, making friends in all kinds of social circles, finding jobs, dating and having sex, finding temporary and permanent lodgings, starting blogging. Judged purely on its material and social results, coming out has been a rather nice positive for me.
What I think that I appreciate most is the sense of normality. I still have various issues, things I want to improve, things I want to accomplish, things which need to be overcome. But more and more frequently, first starting as I went about my life in Kingston last year and then as I go about Toronto now, I feel overcome. I am walking down Yonge Street from Wellesley station, or I am glancing at the coloured tiles on the wall of the staircase leading into Osgoode station, or I am in some other moment (private or not), and I realize how completely unbelievable this life would have been to me a mere three years ago, how unattainable it would have seemed to me then, and how unimaginable that I would have been able to ever accomplish this, and how ridiculously and sadly hopeful it would have been that I could hope to accomplish still more.
I feel, as I observed to Doug, normal. I've got issues, I've got challenges, but they're normal issues and normal challenges. For that, I feel so wonderfully grateful to everything.
